Sunday 9 September 2012

Why do some writers insist on making their work difficult to read?

There seems to be a modern trend towards breaking the rules of grammar and asking the reader to work out what the new rules are. Sometimes I spend so long being a grammar detective, working out who is saying what to whom, that I just give up because I have stopped reading the actual story altogether.

For example, if I had the imagination of Patrick McCabe, and I had worked so hard to craft a book such as ‘The Stray Sod Country’, which I recently tried to read, I would want everyone who had the ability to read and the motivation to want to read, to have full access to it without putting barriers in the way.

The fourth line of Page 1 gives me a clue that he has caught the bug that prevents him using speechmarks:


- O isn’t he the lucky beggar gasped Happy Carroll.

But this is even more difficult than others who adopt this style because the ‘-‘ doesn’t simply replace opening and closing speechmarks - the text after the hypen includes both direct speech and non-speech.

I lasted until page 3 where the following fragment posing as a complete sentence made me realise I was never going to get to a point where I could get past the style to the story:

‘Tentatively extending his large red hand – for the purpose of inspecting some raindrops.’

If this was self-published I could have more sympathy, but this is from Bloomsbury! I’m pretty sure (actually I’m 100% positive) that if I submitted something with the first page from this novel it would have been binned immediately, so how has this happened?

Rant over – what do you think?